Abstract
The number of the Asbestos Bodies (AB), i.e. asbestos that developed an iron-protein coating during its permanence in biological tissues, is one of the most accessible markers of asbestos exposure in individuals. The approaches developed to perform AB count in biological tissues are based on the manual examination of tissue digests or histological sections by means of light or electron microscopies. Although these approaches are well established and relatively accessible, manual examination is time-consuming and can be reader-dependent. Besides, approximations are applied because of the limitations of 2D readings and to speed up manual counts. In addition, sample preparation using tissue digests require an amount of tissue that can only be obtained by invasive surgery or post-mortem sampling. In this paper, we propose a new approach to AB counting based on non-destructive 3D imaging, which has the potential to overcome most of the limitations of conventional approaches. This method allows automating the AB count and determining their morphometry distribution in bulk tissue samples (ideally non-invasive needle biopsies), with minimal sample preparation and avoiding approximations. Although the results are promising, additional testing on a larger number of AB-containing biological samples would be required to fully validate the method.
Highlights
Asbestos is well known to induce several lung diseases, including asbestosis, pleural plaques, malignant mesothelioma, and lung c ancer[1,2,3,4]
X-ray phase-contrast micro-tomography was performed on fragments of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded lung tissue blocks that belonged to four workers subjected to prolonged occupational exposure to asbestos (Table 1)
Hypercellularity is observed, which may be due to an accumulation of monocytes, as alveolar macrophages, in their attempt to engulf and remove the foreign fibres
Summary
Asbestos is well known to induce several lung diseases, including asbestosis, pleural plaques, malignant mesothelioma, and lung c ancer[1,2,3,4]. Based on the results of in vitro (cell cultures) and in vivo (animal) studies, it was showed that AB are able to induce the generation of free radicals[15,16], double strand breaks in the D NA17, and that the iron contained in the coating is catalytically a ctive[15,18,19]. Beyond their possible role in the pathogenesis of asbestos-related diseases, the number of AB in the lungs is the most accessible indicator to assess the asbestos exposure in individuals[20]. Several approaches have been established and refined to extract and estimate the number of AB in unit of weight (g) or volume ( cm3) of wet or dry autoptic (post-mortem) lung tissue samples, broncho-alveolar lavage (BAL) and sputum samples, needle, transbronchial or thoracoscopic biopsy s amples[27,28,29,30,31]
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